Source: YFile Article - October 22, 2018
York University’s history and politics professors continue to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial with the launch of two edited collections featuring Confederation scholarship.
These collections were completed as part of an array of projects to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary, projects that were executed under the leadership of history Professor David Koffman, with support from his colleagues, the administrative staff in the Department of History and the 150CAN@YORK committee.
Globalizing Confederation: Canada and the World in 1867 is co-edited by politics and social science Professor Jacqueline Krikorian and history Professors Marcel Martel and Adrian Shubert. This anthology began as a workshop co-sponsored by the History Department and the Avie Bennett Historica Canada Chair in Canadian History. Sixteen scholars from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Germany, Ireland, Spain and the United States met on York’s Keele Campus in the fall of 2016 to deliver papers that focused on how people, nations and governments understood the union of British North American colonies in 1867.
“Traditionally, Confederation is examined by focusing on domestic politics with an emphasis on the perspectives of political elites like Macdonald and Cartier,” said Shubert. “This edited collection is novel in that it reverses this approach, undertaking its analysis from the outside looking in.”
The collection includes scholarship by several members of the York community, including Roberto Perin, who examined the Vatican’s perspective; Alban Bargain-Villeger, who considered the view from France; Willie Jenkins, who examined the Fenians and Confederation; Gabrielle Slowey, who analyzed the failure to acknowledge the rights of Indigenous peoples; and Jacqueline Krikorian with David Cameron, who together analyzed American views of Confederation.